Fighting the FCC’s New Media Ownership Rules
I don’t know what scares me more – Congress gridlocking important bills over important issues to the point that they’re utterly ineffectual as lawmakers, or Congress uniting across party lines to defeat something that isn’t as obvious as a condemnation of terrorism. And whether you realize it or not, the latter is about to happen. On June 2nd, the Federal Communications Commission passed a regulation change that would’ve drastically altered the media landscape of America. And now, mere weeks later, members of the Senate Commerce Committee are planning to exercise a rare power of veto to send the FCC back to the drawing board.
The contested regulation change passed by the FCC would relax media ownership rules. In plain, simple language, this would place more media outlets – radio, TV and print – under fewer corporate masters. Existing FCC regs put a cap on how much of an audience share any given company can “own” nationally. Currently, broadcast entities can own stations reaching no more than 35% of the nationwide TV, radio and newspaper audience. The cap has been challenged before, and the resulting procedures are long and drawn out. Viacom most recently drew the FCC’s attention with its acquisition of CBS, giving it a whopping 42% of the nationwide market when added to the existing audience share covered by Viacom’s UPN affiliate stations. Other entities, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, have had to divest themselves of owned-and-operated stations run by the network itself to comply with the 35% cap.
What has happened in the wake of the regulation change passed by the FCC – the full details of which are expected to be announced on Monday, June 30th – has been unusual and almost comical: both Democrats and Republicans in Congress practically leaping to the defense of the 35% rule, each party fearing that the other party’s ideals would come to be represented in a larger portion of the country than its own. Democrats voice a fear of more conservative and – being an easy recent issue to use as an example – “pro-war” stances taking over the media, while Republicans fear a media spread of liberalism.
So whether they realize it or not, both parties, fearing the other’s influence, are joining forces to send the FCC’s regulation change back where it came from.
What’s so bad about allowing media giants to own more stations? On a purely ideological level, the original cap was put in place to diversify news coverage, programming and community representation. In theory, if only one company is cranking out the news, there’s a strong possibility of said news becoming propaganda.
In Freedom and Culture (1939), John Dewey argues:
“The [Founding Fathers] were not wrong in emphasizing the need of a free press and of common public schools to provide conditions favorable to democracy. But to them the enemy of freedom of the press was official government censorship and control; they did not foresee the non-political causes that might restrict its freedom, nor the economic factors that would put a heavy premium on centralization.”
And the 35% cap is there to prevent precisely that – much of America’s mass media are already speaking with one voice, but it’s not the one voice of a shadowy government conspiracy telling every network or every news director precisely what to say and precisely what not to say. That one voice is the voice of executive boards trying not to rock the boat. For the sake of the shareholders and the corporate coffers.
That voice also watches the bottom line. Duopolies – the ownership of two seemingly competing entities within the same market by one corporate owner – dilutes the diversity, while offering more programming. So more programming’s a good thing, right? Often, duopolies also involve doubling up on operations and news personnel, paying those employees no more than they’re already making to produce twice the content, or to produce the same amount of content which is then shared by another station.
There’s that one voice again. Duopolies in smaller markets don’t rack up the national audience share number, so many smaller markets have them. And the 35% cap is avoided entirely by the use of LMAs – Local Management Agreements – under which one company merely runs a station for another, again often sharing content. But the rule is skirted since the station under the LMA isn’t owned by the people who are now deciding what airs on it. And for radio, it’s worse – local stations are often reprogrammed with satellite-fed programming, augmented by specially-recorded “liners” from the national talent that localizes call letters, community-of-license, and perhaps other things to convince the listeners it’s local – all while several stations are overseen by a single “babysitter” operator on duty.
But again, we’re just talking theoreticals, things that can go wrong if someone corrupt is at the wheel, right?
Maybe not.
The Worst Case Scenario
June 2, 2003: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell pushes for less regulation of media ownership rules, trying to push through an amendment to current laws that would allow corporate bodies to control more print and broadcast entities.
January 18, 2002: One person dies and eleven others report chemical burns or severe respiratory distress in Minot, North Dakota when a train carrying anhydrous ammonia derails in the dead of night near a neighborhood; police try to issue evacuation and safety instructions to the local media, including seven radio stations, six of which are owned by Clear Channel Communications and are satellite-controlled with only a single operator between all of those stations. That operator doesn’t answer the phone for over an hour, unaware of the emergency.
A lot of time separates those dates, and yet the 2002 incident in Minot has been cited frequently as a grassroots opposition grows to Chairman Powell’s proposed relaxing of media ownerships rules.
And that’s a good thing.
Granted, Minot was a worst-case scenario, but it points out a problem that a growing number of people perceive – and fortunately, this includes people in the business of making or passing federal law – regarding the widening influence of corporate media ownership.
I feel like I’m in a unique position to comment on this, having worked in almost every kind of media ownership situation imaginable: mom ‘n’ pop stations run on a dime a day (of which the employees are generously treated to a fraction), local corporate-owned entities (with the owners in the same state or a nearby one, tending to only a few stations), and national corporate-owned stations. Each situation has its own quirks, its own perks, and its own downfalls.
As the June 2 deadline drew closer, members of Congress and many critics – even those working for major corporate-owned media outlets – questioned the wisdom of Chairman Powell’s plan.
Now, to be fair, Minot city officials had a hard time contacting other media outlets as well, which isn’t uncommon given the time frame; big city or little city, corporate or locally owned, you’d be hard-pressed to find a fully-staffed TV newsroom at 1:30 in the morning. And locally-owned TV and radio aren’t exactly saints – my own home town of Fort Smith, Arkansas has one “anti-corporate” station (which frequently uses the slogan “corporate radio sucks!” on-air and in promotional material) whose owner practices a style of severe weather coverage whose panicky lineage can be traced right back to Orson Welles’ 1939 War Of The Worlds radio broadcast. Feeding on shaky public confidence in the Tulsa National Weather Service office in the wake of the 1996 tornado, this station’s owner was criticized several months later for saying on the air, “Obviously Tulsa’s fallen asleep on this one, so I’m issuing my own tornado warning!”
The cry-wolf factor goes both ways. Now you know what’s even scarier? That there are a lot of people within the media for relaxed ownership rules.
The Bottom Line
If Chairman Powell’s deregulation goes unchallenged, there would be cheers from within media ranks – and not just the boardrooms and CEOs’ offices.
In the past several years, wages in the broadcast industry have undergone a frightening see-saw effect, again something to which I can personally attest. Now, to be fair, the scales have always been weighted toward paying on-air talent (i.e. anchors, weather staff, and sports staff) and management more money, and reporters, technical and off-screen personnel traditionally receive less. Far less. Spend a week in just about any TV newsroom in the country, and you’ll hear plenty of rumblings: why does he get paid so damn much when he just waltzes in here for a few hours to read news that we producers have written? Realistically though, the talent will always make more money.
Some media employees feel that this situation would be corrected if they were owned by a larger media outlet, but it isn’t necessarily so. Too often, the larger media entities are watching the bottom line even more than more local or regional companies. Affiliates of the three big networks in some smaller communities have canned their entire news staff – but this isn’t something that relaxed ownership rules would have fixed. Too often, smaller-market affiliates under a media giant can bear the brunt of a larger sister station’s financial shortfalls – or the ripples may even be felt throughout the entire company. The smaller stations may be doing well financially by the standard of their communities, but when their gains are assessed against a sister station’s losses, the two tend to cancel each other out.
The media giant effect can also be felt when trying to climb the ladder from one station to another within the same company. Ever marked up your salary history just a little while trying to get a better job? It’s impossible to do in this industry when moving from one station to another owned by the same company. Internal conversations do take place, despite EOE laws, and the real numbers do surface. With wider margins for corporate ownership, the tremors in the job market might convince some to bail out of the various media-related professions altogether.
One can’t fault media employees for looking for any silver lining in a cloud, though. In the months/years that have followed September 11th, 2001, the broadcast market suffered greatly, with many media companies making cutbacks across the board. (If you don’t see the chain of cause and effect, ask yourself this: prior to 9/11, how many commercials per prime time program were bought by various airlines?)
Bullet, Dodged?
Sometimes you dodge the bullet, and sometimes the bullet dodges you.
The Congressional smackdown of the relaxed ownership cap is the right thing happening for the wrong reasons: both parties acting entirely on politically-motivated fears, but the combined effect of a veto of the FCC’s relaxed ownership rules would prevent further homogenization of not only programming and news coverage, but of the media job market as well.
But that political bullet hasn’t been dodged yet. And even if the Senate Commerce Committee kills the FCC’s rule change, there’s no saying that it won’t come around again – and this time, it’ll be backed up by FCC lobbyists, and lobbyists for media giants such as Viacom, Disney, Hearst-Argyle, Tribune Communications and Cumulus Broadcasting, all eager to swallow up more stations – and, by extension, more ad revenue from more markets, whether those markets lose a unique local voice or not.
The time has come for action. Keep your Congressperson’s number on speed dial. The time has come for the people to speak with one voice.
Click here to visit the official site for the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, the body which is planning to fight the FCC rule change; contact information for the Subcommittee as a whole and all of its individual members can be found on this page; you can also click here for the equivalent House of Representatives Subcommittee.